Her Song
by the Ambassador
Summary: After it all, Cloud remembers.(Sky and Earth, there ought to be an Introspection genre...)


A/N: This is probably not only rubbish but confusing, so I'll explain a couple things. When I played the game, the party I used in the final battle was Cloud in 1st position, Cait Sith in second, Yuffie in third. Yuffie joined AVALANCHE in the Mideel Area forests, when Cid was leading the party. Virgil was one of two gold chocobos I bred(the other one was a female called Tiamat, in case you're interested, which you probably aren't). The 'perfect moment' was a flash I got while playing after hearing the song mentioned for the first time. This fic? I wrote it after hearing the song again, after a long while, and remembering. It's all pretty much me putting my own thoughts in Cloud's head, truth told!(But it's such a *nice* head! ^.^)  
  
I don't own Cloud, Aeris, or anyone from Final Fantasy VII. Squaresoft seems to think it owns them...but if the big S is looking after them so well, how come they rampaged into the collective conciousness of Fan Fiction Authors loudly demanding Alcohol and Lemons?  
  
______________________  
  
Her Song  
  
______________________  
  
now don't it always seem to go  
  
like you don't know what you've got till it's gone  
  
they paved paradise, put up a parking lot  
  
-big yellow taxi  
  
______________________  
  
I heard her song today.  
  
Well, not *her* song. Not some song that belonged to her and her alone. Not 'our song' either, like some sappy mush from that play LOVELESS. Just a song. And a song that didn't belong to a person. It belonged to a place and a time and a group of people, a song that reminds me now of that place and time and of the fact that she was there in that group and is not now and will never be again.  
  
Although never is perhaps a word that jumps to conclusions...  
  
The sun shone brightly, I remember that. The sun shone bright on the faded red paintwork of the buggy and that song was blasting out from the cheap tinny radio. And Cait Sith was singing along at the top of his voice and driving Barrett up the wall. And Red XIII was sticking his head out the buggy the way dogs do when you take them on a car trip. And *she* had sweet-talked us into letting her drive and she drove like a madwoman, swerving all over the place at high speeds until she almost crashed us into a tree and Tifa captured the steering wheel. And the sun was bright and the grass was green and the desert prison far behind and there was an undercurrent of shared laughter among us and it might almost have been a perfect moment...  
  
*Now don't it always seem to go, like you don't know what you've got till it's gone, They paved Paradise, put up a parking lot...*  
  
And the moment passed, because that's what moments do. And Cait was a traitor and Barrett fighting for false reasons and Red a mere child and Tifa kept secrets and I wasn't who or what I thought I was...  
  
And Aeris died.  
  
She died protecting the Planet and that would be all the motive needed if this was a fairytale because dying to protect the Planet is what Aerises do. You can see that in Yuffie, Yuffie who never knew Aeris and does not understand us who did and thinks of her merely as Aeris-who-died-protecting-the-Planet, a cardboard cutout, a character in a story. I don't blame her for it-how can I blame her for not understanding how we feel about someone who died before she joined AVALANCHE? Especially when she unexpectedly stood forward and proved herself once and for all in the final battle, the Battle in the Caldera-the last person I'd ever have expected to step forward, except perhaps the other member who did so. It was certainly a shock at the time.  
  
But Aeris wasn't cardboard, and she wasn't the princess from a story. She was Aeris Gainsborough, a tough Midgar street girl with no idea of a fair fight who could bash a pickpocket or an assaulter to pieces and leave him groaning in an alley and five minutes later be smiling sweet as daybreak and offering a passer-by a flower, who just happened to be half-Cetra, the 'last of the Ancients' who heard the Planet talking and took to magic like a blue chocobo to water but who doled out mysticness and forgotten secret information like they cost money, who would drag us into bars and get drunk and belligerent and start bashing things at random with a big metal stick, who was tough as nails and as soft as caramel and confused the hell out of you by never acting in a way that made sense with your impressions of her...  
  
I was angry, afterwards. Not wholly at Sephiroth, though-at her, too. 'Aeris will never again laugh, cry...or get angry...' But I don't think I understood what 'never' meant, even then. The way she had acted kept secrets from us and slipped off in the night, the way things played out and I found myself in the middle...it seemed like some strange, twisted *game* that Aeris and Sephiroth were playing...and I, I was a pawn.  
  
I didn't think, 'Aeris has died' then. It just...didn't sink in. I thought, 'Aeris has gone off and left me'.  
  
I still do think that, sometimes. It's not something I could tell anyone. It's such a silly, childish feeling...'Aeris has gone off to the Lifestream without me. Isn't she mean?' No, I couldn't tell anyone about *that*.  
  
After the anger ebbed...it felt like a hole. Hole in the heart.  
  
***  
  
I suppose that if I was going to remember her I should have gone to the City of the Ancients, where her bones lie under the water. And I swear to God, when I saddled up Virgil and rode out that's where I meant to go.  
  
But somehow, for some reason, I never went there. Maybe it was the place that stopped me-the indecipherable writings of people who lived and died a thousand years ago, the air about it that felt as if someone had told me, politely but forcefully, 'You do not belong here. Go home.'  
  
Instead, I went to another place. A place somewhere between the Gold Saucer desert and the forests of Gongaga.  
  
I lay on the grass and looked at the sky and felt the sun's rays on my face. Virgil warked softly and scratched at the ground where I'd tethered him. Insects buzzed about. Monsters howled to each other, far off.  
  
Her death still feels like a hole, like an empty part of me. But now...it doesn't hurt so much. It feels more like a calm place-melancholy perhaps, but serene about it-where something might quietly enter in.  
  
As something enters now. I realise I'm humming the song, her song, the perfect-moment song. Perhaps if I looked hard enough, in the right place, I'd find shallow ruts made by the wheels of a barely-controlled buggy.  
  
But I don't need to look. Why search for physical evidence when I don't need it? I don't need proof that she once was here. I remember...and somewhere in the Lifestream, where she whispers into the empty place inside me, I know she does too. 


End file.
